Description

Recent decades have seen change in social attitudes toward parenting
within the United Kingdom. During this time, parenting has received
an unprecedented amount of attention from government, through
legislation and policy initiatives, as well as becoming a regular topic
in the news media, television programs, and for book publishers.
The consequence of this social change is that parents today, arguably,
face far greater pressure in terms of sifting and weighing the
wide range of messages, opinions, and information targeted at them.
Despite these social changes, parents and parenting have received
comparatively little attention from researchers specifically examining
their information literacy needs. This article is based upon research
conducted using constructivist grounded theory and examines how
a group of thirty-three parents in Leeds, United Kingdom looked
for, accessed, and assessed information. The primary outcome of the
research is a substantive grounded theory, which is framed within
five categories: being a parent (core category); connectivity; trust;
picture of self; weighing. These five categories describe how parents
look for, access, and weigh information on a daily basis. This theory
has implications for how organizations, services, and professionals
convey information to parents. It also supports the notion of a need
to view information literacy as part of a complex socially constructed
paradigm.
Introduction

Issue Date:

2012

Publisher:

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign